Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this book, free of charge, from Calisto Publishing, for review purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it.
Synopsis:
American Advertising Cookbooks, How Corporations Taught Us To Love Spam, Bananas, and Jell&ndashO explores the world of Twentieth Century food culture combining historical cookbook images and intelligent research into an entertaining and accessible history of food.
American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O is a deeply researched and entertaining survey of twentieth century American food. Connecting cultural, social, and geopolitical aspects, author Christina Ward (Preservation: The Art & Science of Canning , Fermentation, and Dehydration, Process 2017) uses her expertise to tell the fascinating and often infuriating story of American culinary culture.
Readers will learn of the role bananas played in the Iran-Contra scandal, how Sigmund Freud's nephew decided Carmen Miranda would wear fruit on her head, and how Puritans built an empire on pineapples. American food history is rife with crackpots, do-gooders, con men, and scientists all trying to build a better America-while some were getting rich in the process.
Loaded with full-color images, Ward pulls recipes and images from her vast collection of cookbooks and a wide swath of historical advertisements to show the influence of corporations on our food trends. Though easy to mock, once you learn the true history, you will never look at Jell-O the same way again!
American Advertising Cookbooks, How Corporations Taught Us To Love Bananas, Spam, and Jell&ndashO features full-color images and essays uncovering the origins of popular foods.
Review:
My mom LOVED advertising cookbooks. SERIOUSLY loved them! Every time we went to a thrift/antique store, she looked for them! We have some that go back to 1920! They truly are an unique way to look at American culture, and not only how we cooked, but what was popular (microwave, fondue pot, insta-pot, LOL). They're like little sociological microcosms.
So when I saw the cover of this book, I KNEW I had to read it!
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| Some of our collection of recipe pamphlets |
Kitsch is in, right? Well, thanks to this book, you'll learn all about how those recipes came to be, and more interesting, the amazing backstory behind them! For instance, we all think of pineapples, and immediately think Hawaii. But that is only a MODERN capitalism product! Thanks to a certain Dole family, the native Queen was disposed, plantations built and pineapple soon became an export with a backstory people forget about. How do you get people not to think about the unsavory past of your company? Send out cookbooks to help the public learn how to cook with this new food product. How else do you think the pineapple slices on ye old Christmas ham became SO popular????
When companies enlisted the media and home economists, the modern American propaganda system truly began! Recipes may seem innocuous, but after reading this book, you'll see that in order for these 'founding' food companies to become massive, they needed a way to keep the masses hooked on their products. There are quite a few stories here that will stun and shock the normal reader, who are unaware of how these simple books helped to make the products universal, and keep them there!
If you know someone who loves cookbooks, they will love learning all about the history behind these old recipe pamphlets, and how our 'traditional' recipes have come about!
Recipe:
Here's a traditional recipe from one of mom's advertising cookbooks. While the original recipe is from medieval times, with the advent of bottled lemon juice and shelf stable cornstarch, the recipe was brought out to home ec teachers all over the states, and bamm, it was a holiday tradition! This is actually the recipe we've always used, and it's from the late 1940's!
Giveaway:
In honor of Mom and her love of advertising cookbooks, I'm giving the reader who can tell me they have the most advertising cookbooks, these fun cookbook bookmarkers!
Not only do they mark a recipe, they allow you to note specifics and thoughts about it- great for those who hate to write in cookbooks, but want to make sure recipe changes get noted, if they're not around to share them!
So if you want to win this set, just comment BELOW on how many of these advertising type pamphlet/cookbooks YOU have in your house! Highest number wins!
About the Author:
Christina Ward teaches notoriously raucous preservation classes and serves as a volunteer mentor to urban farmers, small-scale food producers, and question answerer for people all over the country trying to save their pickles from disaster. Her work focuses on the history the foods we eat and the stories of the people who make that food taste good. She is a contributing writer to Serious Eats, resident food expert for Fox6 Real Milwaukee (television), and former columnist for Edible Milwaukee. She has also written for Remedy Quarterly, Put An Egg On It!, and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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